Developers of Wuxi-made Sunway TaihuLight are aiming to make the supercomputer run up to 10 times faster, in a bid to maintain its crown as the world's fastest and most powerful.
R&D for the next generation of the supercomputer, housed at Wuxi's National Supercomputing Center, has been included in China's 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20) which is expected to make its debut around 2020, said Yang Guangwen, director of the center.
Developed by the National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology (NRCPC), Sunway TaihuLight broke the Guinness World Record for fastest supercomputer in June 2016. It is capable of performing 93 petaflops/s (quadrillions of calculations per second), with a peak speed of 125.4 petaflops/s. It was the first time a Chinese supercomputer topped the list using completely domestic technology, with all of its processors being designed and made in China.
Sunway TaihuLight is ranked the fastest and most powerful supercomputer in the world on a list compiled by TOP500, a world renowned computer ranking project, on June 20, 2016. [Photo/nsccwx.cn] |
To date, the global supercomputing field has raised the speed peak to level E – denoting processing speeds hitting 1,000 petaflops/s – and a great leap calculation density, transmission speeds and power consumption.